Industry/University Cooperative Research Activity: Transient Behavior of Deep Bed Filtration

作为一种流固分离过程，深床过滤器在从大量液体中去除少量细颗粒方面最有效。传统上，该工艺主要用于处理供水。近年来，它的应用已扩展到许多领域，包括废水处理，从进入催化反应器的原料中去除固体，熔融金属（铝）的净化以确保金属锭的质量，以及涉及许多分离操作的原料流的预处理，如膜和固定床吸附过程。最近努力的一个重要部分是为了更好地理解与过滤过程有关的各种现象。这项工作将研究深床过滤器的瞬态行为——具体来说，滤液质量和压降的动态变化将在一组受控实验中进行测量，并与颗粒再夹带的分析模型相关联。

As a fluid-solid separation process, deep bed filters are most effective in removing small amounts of fine particles from mass quantities of liquid. Traditionally, the process is used primarily in treating water supplies. In more recent years, its application has been extended to a number of fields, including waste water treatment, removal of solids from feed stocks entering catalytic reactors, purification of molten metal (aluminum) to insure the quality of the metal ingot, and pretreatment of feed streams involved in many separation operations, such as membrane and fixed-bed adsorption processes. A significant part of recent efforts is directed toward achieving a better understanding of the various phenomena associated with the filtration process. This effort will investigate the transient behavior of deep bed filters--specifically, the dynamic change in filtrate quality and pressure drop will be measured in a controlled set of experiments and correlated with analytical models of particle reentrainment.